Social perception of others

SIGNIFICANCE: Social perception deals with how people think about and make sense of other people: how they form impressions, draw conclusions, and try to explain other people’s behavior.

Social perception deals with two general classes of cognitive-perceptual processes through which people process, organize, and recall information about others. Those that deal with how people form impressions of other people’s personalities (called person perception) form the first class. The second class includes those processes that deal with how people use this information to draw conclusions about other people’s motivations, intentions, and emotions in order to explain and predict their behavior (called attribution processes). The importance of social perception in social psychology is revealed in the fact that one’s impressions and judgments about others, whether accurate or not, can have profound effects on one’s own and others’ behavior.

Causal Attribution

People are naturally motivated to understand and predict the behavior of those around them. Being able to predict and understand the social world gives people a sense of mastery and control over their environment. Psychologists who study social perception have shown that people try to make sense of their social worlds by determining whether other people’s behavior is produced by disposition, by some internal quality or trait unique to a person, or by something in the situation or environment. The process of making such determinations, which is called causal attribution, was developed by social psychologists Fritz Heider, Edward Jones, Keith Davis, and Harold Kelley in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

According to these attribution theorists, when one decides that a person’s behavior reflects a disposition (when, for example, one decides that a person is friendly because he acted friendly), one has made an internal or dispositional attribution. In contrast, when one decides that a person’s behavior was caused by something in the situation—he acted in a friendly way to make someone like him—one has made an external or situational attribution. The attributions one makes for others’ behaviors carry considerable influence in the impressions one forms of them and in how one will behave toward them in the future.

People’s impressions and attributions are not always accurate. For example, in many situations, people are inclined to believe that other people’s behavior is caused by dispositional factors. At the same time, they believe that their own behavior is the product of situational causes, particularly in situations where the outcome is negative. This tendency has been called the actor-observer bias. Moreover, when people try to explain the causes of other people’s behavior, especially behavior that is clearly and obviously caused by situational factors (factors such as a coin flip, a dice roll, or some other situational inducement), they tend to underestimate situational influences and overestimate the role of dispositional causes. This tendency is called correspondence bias, over-attribution effect, or the fundamental attribution error. In other words, people prefer to explain other people’s behavior in terms of their traits or personalities rather than in terms of situational factors, even when situational factors actually cause the behavior.

Heuristics

In addition to these biases, social psychologists have examined other ways in which people’s impressions of others and inferences about the causes of their behavior can be inaccurate or biased. In their work, for example, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have described a number of simple but efficient thinking strategies, or “rules of thumb,” called heuristics. These thinking strategies are mental shortcuts that use generalizations to evaluate observed stimuli quickly but not deeply. The availability heuristic is the tendency to explain behaviors based on causes that are easily or quickly brought to mind. Similarly, the representativeness heuristic is the tendency to believe that a person who possesses characteristics that are associated with a social group probably belongs to that group. Other heuristics include the anchoring heuristic (relying on a first impression to inform future impressions), affect heuristic (letting emotions in a moment influence perception), scarcity heuristic (scarcity increases value), and familiarity heuristic (favoring similarities to oneself or one's previous experiences). Although heuristics make social thinking more efficient and sometimes yield reasonable results, they can lead to significant judgment errors and bias.

Schemata

Bias can also arise in social perception in a number of other ways. Because of the enormous amount of social information humans process at any given moment, people have developed various ways of organizing, categorizing, and simplifying this information and the expectations they have about various people, objects, and events. These organizational structures are called social schemata. For example, schemata that organize information about people’s membership in different categories or groups are called stereotypes or prototypes. Schemata that organize information about how traits go together in forming a person’s personality are called implicit personality theories (IPTs). Although schemata, like heuristics, help make social thinking more efficient and yield reasonable results most of the time, they can also sometimes lead to significant judgment errors, such as prejudice and discrimination.

Finally, social perception can be influenced by various factors that people are consciously unaware of but can exert tremendous influence on their thinking. Social psychologist Solomon Asch was the first to describe the primacy effect in impression formation. The primacy effect is the tendency for things seen or received first to have a greater impact on one’s thinking than things that come later. Many other things in the environment can prime one, or make one “ready,” to see, interpret, or remember things that one might not otherwise have seen, thought about, or remembered. Priming occurs when something in the environment makes certain things easier to remember.

During the 1970s and 1980s, social psychologists made numerous alterations and extensions of the existing theories of attribution and impression formation to keep pace with the field’s growing emphasis on mental (cognitive) and emotional (affective) processes. These changes focused primarily on incorporating work from cognitive psychology on memory processes, the use of schemata, and the interplay of emotion, motivation, and cognition.

Biases and Social Problems

Social psychologists have argued that many social problems have their roots in social perception processes. Because social perception biases can sometimes result in inaccurate perceptions, misunderstandings, conflict between people and groups, and other negative consequences, social psychologists have spent much time and effort trying to understand these perception biases. Their hope is that by understanding such biases, they will be able to suggest solutions for them. For example, in a number of experiments, social psychologists have attempted to understand the social perception processes that may lead to stereotyping, which can result in prejudice and discrimination (prejudice and stereotyping).

One explanation for why stereotypes are so hard to change once they have been formed is the self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-fulfilling prophecies occur when one has possibly inaccurate beliefs about others (such as stereotypes and self-fulfilling prophecies) and acts on those beliefs, bringing about the conditions necessary to make those beliefs come true. In other words, when one expects something to be true about another person (especially negative things), one frequently looks for and finds what one expects to see. At other times, one actually brings out the negative (or positive) qualities one expects to be present. In a classic 1968 study by social psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, for example, children whose teachers expected them to show a delayed but substantial increase in their intelligence (on the basis of a fictitious intelligence test) scored higher on a legitimate intelligence quotient (IQ) test administered at the end of the school year. Presumably, the teachers’ expectations of those students caused them to treat those students in ways that actually helped them perform better. Similarly, social psychologists Rebecca Curtis and Kim Miller have shown that when people think someone they meet likes them, they act in ways that lead that person to like them. If, however, people think a person dislikes them, they act in ways that actually make that person dislike them.

The behaviors that produce self-fulfilling prophecies can be subtle. For example, in 1974, social psychologists Carl Word, Mark Zanna, and Joel Cooper demonstrated that the subtle behaviors of interviewers during job interviews can make applicants believe that they performed either poorly or very well. These feelings, in turn, can lead to actual good or poor performance on the part of the applicants. What was most striking about this study, however, was that the factor that led to the subtle negative or positive behaviors was the interviewers’ stereotypes of the applicants’ racial group membership. Black applicants received little eye contact from interviewers and were not engaged in conversation; the behaviors displayed by interviewers in the presence of White applicants were exactly the opposite. Not surprisingly, Black applicants were seen as less qualified and were less likely to be hired. Clearly, subtle behaviors produced by racial stereotypes can have major consequences for the targets of those stereotypes.

The relevance of social perception processes to everyday life is not restricted to stereotyping, although stereotyping is indeed an important concern. In academic settings, for example, situational factors can lead teachers to form impressions of students that have little bearing on their actual abilities. Social psychologist Edward Jones and his colleagues have examined the way in which primacy effects operate in academic settings. Two groups of subjects saw a student perform on a test. One group saw the student start out strong and then begin to do poorly. The other group saw the student start out poorly and then begin to improve. For both groups, the student’s performance on the test was identical, and the student received the same score. The group that saw the student start out strong and then falter thought the student was brighter than the student who started out poorly and then improved. Clearly, first impressions matter.

Finally, research on the correspondence bias makes it clear that one must be very careful when trying to understand what people are like. In many situations, the demands of people’s occupations or their family roles force them to do things with which they may not agree. Substantial research has shown that observers will probably think these persons have personalities that are consistent with their behaviors. Lawyers who must defend people who may have broken the law, debaters who must argue convincingly for or against a particular point of view, and actors who must play parts that they did not write are all vulnerable to being judged based on their behavior. Lawyers may not believe their clients are innocent, but must defend them as though they do. Debaters often argue for positions with which they do not agree. Actors play roles that do not match their personalities. Unless one is particularly sensitive to the fact that, when they are doing their jobs, these persons’ behaviors do not reveal anything about their true personalities, one may actually (and incorrectly) believe that they do.

Continuing Research

Modern research continues to investigate people’s perceptions of others’ actions and the factors influencing their opinions. Neuroscience studies have found that facial expressions, eye contact, gaze shifts, and the subconscious prediction of what a person’s expressions should be in specific contexts influence judgments of trustworthiness and likability. These judgments form in the brain’s fusiform gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior temporal lobe based on past experiences and a person’s own typical behavior. Some research indicates that people heavily rely on internal predictions rather than sensory input to form opinions about others' actions and their future actions. Based on past experiences, the brain forms assumptions about intentions and predictions of future behavior.

Other research has focused on the impact of cultural differences on the interpretation of social cues and facial expressions in forming opinions of others and the impact technology has on the perception of emotion.

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